Archive for the ‘Utility’ Category

Windows users are excited over the discovery of a hidden “GodMode” feature that lets users access all of the operating system’s control panels from within a single folder.  In order to enable this feature all you need to do is to create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Once that is done, the folder’s icon will change to resemble a control panel and will contain dozens of control options.

I think most of these options are available elsewhere, but this provides a simple, easy-to-use method to access all of them.

LogMeIn is a platform that we use internally for our own computers as well as all our clients.

One of the most useful features of the LogMeIn offering is the ability to setup a secondary user to allow access to one or more computers in your account.  It is pretty easy to setup this feature.

By creating Secondary Users in your LogMeIn account, you can allow remote access to one or more of your computers.   Secondary Users have access only to the computers that you authorize, and you can disable their access at any time.  Secondary Users can not see any details of your LogMeIn account.

To create a Secondary User, follow these steps:

1. Log in to LogMeIn.com using your registered email and password.
2. On the My Computers page, click the Users link on the left side of the screen.  If you do not see the Users link you probably have to change your view to be “Advanced View”.
3. Click the Secondary Users link at the top of the screen
4. Click Add New Secondary User.
5. Enter the email address for the Secondary User that you are adding to you account.
6. If you don’t specifically change the permissions, the secondary user will have access to all computers in your account.  However, you can select specific computers using the Specify Computers option
7. Once done, click Send Invitation.

Note: Secondary Users are required to define their own password when accepting the invitation, and can change it at any time.   The Secondary User will need to know the Windows Username and Password for the computer’s they have received access to.  If the computers are on a domain they can probably login with their own domain logins.

One of the great features of Outlook (but also sometimes annoying) is that it remembers all the email addresses of the people that you send email to or receive email from.  This makes it really easy for composing emails except for when you get an email address that is spelled incorrectly in that list.  That can be extremely frustrating.

Turns out that it is super simple to remove that email address.  Just compose and email and start typing the address.  When you see it appear, just use the arrows to select the one that is incorrect and press the Delete key.  It will be gone forever.  Quick and easy.

If you want to clear the entire email history, you can do the following:

• Exit Outlook
• Run Windows Explorer
• Navigate to the C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook folder (substitute username with your username)
• Find the file with the NK2 extension and rename or delete it.

A few weeks ago a client of ours asked if there was a way to get a Remote Desktop session to go full screen across the two monitors that they had connected to their computer.  There didn’t seem to be an obvious method to do this.  Upon some further research we discovered that there was a command line option for the Remote Desktop application called /span which allows a single session to span multiple monitors.

If you have two (or more) monitors that are the same height, you could issue the following command:

mstsc /span

When the Remote Desktop application starts up it will ask you what Computer you want to connect to.  Just enter the name or IP address of the computer and you will be connected in full screen mode across your two (or more) monitors.

Some notes from the Microsoft Help about what the /span option does and its limitations:

Matches the remote desktop width and height with the local virtual desktop, spanning across multiple monitors if necessary. To span across monitors, the monitors must all have the same height and be aligned side by side.

In order to save the /span option into the .rdp file you will need to manually edit it:

• Open Windows Explorer, and browse to the folder containing the .rdp file you want to edit.
• Right-click the file > Open With > Choose Program > Notepad (or any other text editing program you have installed on your computer)
• Once the file is open in Notepad go to the bottom of the file and add the following command: span monitors:i:1
• Save the file.

Now your rdp file will automatically span monitors when executed.

Need to extract information from IIS such as IP Addresses, Host Headers, Log Directories and lots more. This great little script from David Wang does a great job of this.  It saved me hours and hours of work going through all my IIS servers manually.

Thanks David!

You are responsible for one or more Windows web servers and you have all these IIS log files that you want to make some sense out of.   If you have some basic SQL skills Microsoft is making available a utility called LogParser which does a great job getting in there and allowing you to query the files directly using some basic SQL syntax.   The feature I like the best is the ability to convert the data into a SQL table for manipulation via T-SQL.

Here is a sample of what I did (this would all go on a single line)

c:\”program files”\”log parser 2.2″\LogParser -iCheckPoint:myCheckPoint.lpc -o:SQL -server:localhost -database:IISLogs -createtable:ON “SELECT * FROM ex0810*.log TO IISLogs”

This short command line will read in all log files that start with ex0810 and import them into a table called IISLogs.  It will also create a checkpoint file so that if you run the command again it will not import records that have already been imported.

How cool is that?

Once all the importing is done you can leverage the SQL tables using whatever methods you need to.

If you need any help with stuff, send us a note at support at quarksoft.com.

I finally had upgraded to Outlook 2007 about a month ago and one of the features I found myself using a lot was the Preview feature for attachments. It was great for the PDF and the typical office documents, but there were no preview handlers for files such as WAV. I have a VOIP line that emails me the voice mail messages that have been left so having a WAV previewer would be really useful for me.

During my search for such a feature I ran across a great utility from Gil Azar (and in his post gives credit to lots of others for their help). You can download the ultimate Outlook 2007 preview handler from his site.

If you are interested in some of the technical details Gil discusses them on his page and provides some really great links.

I’ve included parts of Gil’s original post just in case his site disappears one day.

A self-extracting installer, which silently installs Stephen Toub’s MSDN Magazine Managed Preview Handler Framework and Gil’s small addition, can be downloaded here

I ran into a problem scheduling the transfer of a file via FTP today.  The server was behind a firewall that required me to use PASV FTP support.  Unfortunately the command line version of FTP that comes with Windows 2003 was not able to support this configuration (at least I could not figure out how to make it support it).

In trying to figure out a solution to this issue I ran across NcFTP.  This is primarily a *nix based FTP tool (both server and client), but it has a Windows command line version of FTP that proved to be just the tool I needed.  You can download the Windows version of the client or if you prefer they have lots of *nix flavors.

I have this client that posted several hundred files on their internal web site that I needed to download to my laptop for testing purposes.  I started downloading them one by one and thought that there must be a better way without installing some big application to do this.  With a little Google searching I found a great open source utility called wget that provides everything I needed from a command line (which had the added bonus of being able to easily script it).

An example of the command to recursively download a web site is shown below:

wget -l2 -r -k http://www.siteyouwanttoget.com/folder1

• The -l parameter tells the software how many levels to download (I only needed 2 levels deep in my example)
• The -r parameter tells it to download recursively
• The -k parameter tell is to convert non-relative links into relative ones so that there will not be any dependencies on the original site.

So there you have it. One simple, small 162Kb EXE that does exactly what I needed (it also does ALOT more than this). Have Fun!

The below information is taken from this post from here. I copied a majority of the text just in case his site disappears one day since this information is really valuable.  I would like to give credit to Ben Armstrong for providing invaluable information on the topics surrounding Virtual PC, Virtual Server and its benefits and pitfalls.

One cool use of Virtual PC is as a ‘backup’ during a physical computer migration.

What I do is:

1. Setup the new computer with Windows, virtual PC, and as many of the applications from the old computer that I know about
2. Take the hard disk out of her old computer and attach it to the new computer
3. Boot up the new computer
4. Go into the Disk Management tool under Windows (Control Panel –> Administrative tools –> Computer Management –> Disk Management)
5. Select to remove the disk letter from the hard disk from the old computer
6. Start Virtual PC
7. Use the Virtual Hard Disk wizard to create a linked virtual hard disk pointing to the hard disk from the old computer
8. Then use the Virtual Hard Disk wizard to convert the linked virtual hard disk to a dynamic virtual hard disk
9. Wait a long time (usually 2 to 3 hours)
   1. Any anti-virus software should be disabled for this step – otherwise it will take a lot longer
10. Create a new virtual machine that points to the new virtual hard disk
11. Boot up the virtual machine and confirm that everything works
    1. There are a few things that can cause this to fail – and I will discuss them in further depth in coming posts
12. Install the Virtual Machine Additions and shutdown the virtual machine
13. Shutdown the new computer and remove the old disk

Once this is done – I can begin migrating data and application information from the virtual machine to the physical computer over the network. But the best thing is that if a program doesn’t work – you can just launch the virtual machine and use it there for now.

You might also run into a problem during this process that can be resolved using the following method (original post can be found here):

This post is going to focus on migrating Windows systems – but there are similar issues with migration of most other operating systems.

Problem 1: “STOP:0×000007B Inaccessible Boot Device”

You image the physical computer to a virtual machine – and now when you boot it blue screens almost immediately with a “STOP:0×000007B Inaccessible Boot Device” message.  What is going on?  Well, Windows maintains a list of ‘critical boot devices’ that are loaded in order to boot the system.  One of these devices is going to be the hard disk controller that you boot the system off of.  Sometimes – your physical computer will be close enough to the virtual machine that you do not see this error message.  However – if you do see this problem – you will need to do the following:

1. Go back to the original physical computer
2. Boot Windows
3. Go to ‘Start’ –> ‘Control Panel’ –> ‘Administrative Tools’ –> ‘Computer Management’ –> ‘Device Manager’
4. Expand the ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers selection’
5. Double click the ‘controller’ entry (not the ‘Channel’ entries)
6. Go to the ‘Driver’ tab
7. Select ‘Update Driver’
8. Select to ‘Install from a list or specific location (advanced)’
9. Select ‘Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install’
10. This should display a list with your specific controller and a Standard / generic controller.  Select the standard / generic controller.
11. Finish the wizard
12. Shutdown the system
13. Attempt to migrate the system again

This is the only problem that I am going to discuss in this series that requires you to make a change to the physical system before you migrate it – but thankfully it is a non-destructive change – as you will still be able to boot the physical system with no problems after this change.